“Packed up and left Oregon the minute he died. I send her money sometimes. At least, I did before...”
“Obviously you couldn’t send money when you were in prison.”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t think you understand. She didn’t want anything from me after that. She didn’t believe me. That I didn’t have something to do with Alicia’s disappearance. She figured I was cut from the same cloth as my old man.”
“How could she think that?” Faith asked. “She was your mother.”
“In the end, she was a woman standing with another woman. And part of me can’t blame her for that. I think it was easier for her to believe that her worst nightmare had come true. That I had fully become the creation of my genetics. You can understand why she would have feared that.”
He had feared it, too. Sometimes he still did.
Because that hate—that hard, heavy fist of rage living in his chest—felt far too evil to have been put there recently. It felt born into him. As much a part of him as that first memory.
He swept her up into his arms then and carried her toward the house, holding her tightly against his chest. She clung to him, her fingers slick against his skin, greedy as they trailed over him.
“That’s who I am,” he said, taking her hand and pressing it against the scar left by the knife. “And that’s why I told you I wasn’t the right man for you. That’s why I told you to stay away from me.”
She shifted her hand, moving her fingertips along the scarred, raised flesh. The evidence of the day he’d been cut open and left to bleed. He’d considered lying down and dying. A damn low moment. He had been sentenced to life in prison, he’d thought. Why not let that sentence be a little shorter?
But his instincts, his body, hadn’t let him give up. No. He’d gotten back up. And hit the man who’d come after him. And then hit him again, and again.
No one had come for Levi after that.
She made a soft sound as she shifted, letting her fingers glide over to the edge of the bird’s wing. She traced the shape, its whole wingspan.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Thisis who you are. This,” she said. “This scar... You didn’t choose that. You didn’t choose to be born into a life of violence. You didn’t choose your father. You didn’t choose that time in prison. Didn’t choose to get in a fight that day and have your body cut open. You chosethis. These wings. This design. Whatever it means to you, you chose that. And it’s more real than anything that was inflicted on you could ever be.”
He stopped her from talking then, captured her mouth with his and silenced her with the fierceness of his kiss.
He wanted everything she said to be real. He wanted her words to matter, as much as everything that had come before them. As much as every blow he’d witnessed, every blow he’d been subjected to, every vile insult.
He wanted her kiss to mean more than his past.
He smoothed his hands down her body, his touch filled with reverence, filled with awe.
This woman, so beautiful and sweet, would touchhim. Would give herself tohim.
Yes, he wanted to believe what she said. He did. But he could see no way to do that. Couldn’t find it in himself.
He could only be glad that somehow, he had found her.
He wanted to drown in her, as much as he had wanted to drown in the rain. To feel renewed. Clean. If only for a moment. She was like that spring rain. Restorative. Redemptive. More than he deserved, and essential in ways he wouldn’t let himself think about.
She moved her hands over his body, over his face, pressing kisses to the scar on his ribs, to the tattoo, lower. Until she took him into her mouth, her tongue swirling in a torturous pattern over the swollen head of his erection. He bucked up, gripping her hair even as a protest escaped his lips.
“Let me,” she said softly.
And then she returned her attention to him, this beautiful woman who had never done this for a man before. She lavished him with the kind of attention he didn’t deserve, not from anyone, least of all her.
But he wanted it, wanted her. He wanted this in a way he hadn’t wanted anything for longer than he could remember. Hewanted, and it was because of her.
Hewanted, and he would never forget her for it.
Hewanted, and he would never forgive her for it.
She was hope. She was a promise of redemption he could never truly have.
She wasfaith, that’s what she was. Believing in something you couldn’t see or control. Until now, he had never wanted any part of something like that.
